How the Columbia University College Republicans impeached their club president and how they took over the national narrative of the encampment
By Eli Baum
I’m in a cramped, windowless room in Lerner. There aren’t enough chairs, so some people have to stand. If you’re looking for the people who would significantly shape the national narrative of the Columbia encampment, look no further. Many are here. But right now, it’s March 5, 2024, and the encampment does not exist. Right now, in this room, the Columbia University College Republicans are holding their election.
It’s chaos. Everyone is raising their voice in the multiple conversations that are all going on at once. I’m standing at the back of the room trying to talk to a voter who is more focused on repeatedly shouting, “Rigged! Rigged! Rigged!” towards the front. I try eavesdropping on a conversation between three voters about how their own club election will be much cleaner than this one; when they realize I’m listening they switch to a Slavic language.
At the front of the room, the real conflict is taking place. A number of men have gotten out of their seats to confront the vote counter about her methodology for vote counting. “[They] were literally harassing this girl, and there's no other way to describe it,” says one witness. The vote counter agrees with this characterization. “I was like, ‘take a girl out for dinner first,’” she later tells me. “I was feeling physically uncomfortable. My face was red. They were too close.”
The problem was this: One of the candidates, Ariana Deen, BC ’25, had allegedly recruited a crowd of non-club members to come to the election and vote for her. An extremely large crowd, in fact. The club—which consistently had around 15 members at their meetings, according to two former members of the club’s executive board—had never taken attendance. Confronted with what looked to be at least 40 people, nobody knew what to do. A speech was interrupted, the club constitution pulled out, and the executive board summoned to the front, but all of this led nowhere.
Deen won, and by the end of the night, she was the president of the Columbia Republicans.
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“I acted in good faith, to my knowledge,” says Deen. Later, when I ask her if she identifies as a Republican, she says: “I don't think that matters.” There’s speculation among club members about why she wants to be president of the club. “It's to gain those administrative skills,” Deen tells me. “Learn how you book an event.”
David Pomerantz, CC ’26, was the other candidate. His election night speech emphasized his identity as a New York Republican. You can see him around campus wearing various forms of Mets and Knicks paraphernalia. He declined to interview on the record.
After the election, Pomerantz & co. were upset. They had lost the vote to a collection of people who they had never seen at the club. And so on April 1, 2024, the Columbia Republicans impeached their newly elected president for “intentionally solicit[ing] multiple non-members who had never attended a CUCR event to attend the special election … lie about their involvement in the club, and vote for her.” Essentially, eliciting voter fraud.
The impeachment lasted no more than 15 minutes, and no one seems to have a great memory of it except Deen. She had originally called a board meeting to amend the constitution because it “clearly … had a lot of ambiguities.” When she entered, her suitemate, who also happened to be on the board, moved to impeach.
Deen describes it as a “put your head down and raise your hand situation,” and the vote was unanimously in favor of impeachment. “Everyone looks at [Pomerantz] and they’re like, ‘I guess he’s acting president now or whatever,’” Deen explains. “And as he walks out, he has, like, a smirk on his face.”
There was one article that covered what had happened. It was not from The Spectator and it wasn’t even from Bwog. It was from a news source that, at the time, almost no one had heard of before: Sundial.
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Sundial was founded by Jonas Du, CC ’25, one of the two men confronting the vote counter on the night of the election. He was originally the managing editor of The Independent, a campus publication that was slipped under every student’s door with articles like “Why I don’t give my pronouns.” After three semesters of publication, Du broke with the Independent executive board because, as he puts it, “the goal of [The Independent] is not to be a puppet of the John Jay society,” referring to the secretive conservative campus debate group. Du then convinced the staff writers of the organization to leave and join Sundial, a newsletter that he had created. (The editors of The Independent no longer had anything to edit and so the organization collapsed, according to Du.) If you ask Du, he’ll say that he’s a centrist of one form or another—in our June interview he voiced support for Nikki Haley and Eric Adams, and he described himself as the voice of “what you might call the silent majority of Columbia students.” Two members of the Columbia Republicans called him one of Deen’s “cronies.”
After the election and subsequent impeachment of Deen, Du’s Sundial published an article called “Banana Republicans.” The cover is a picture of two elephants mauling each other with their tusks and the caption reads, “A typical board meeting at Columbia’s Republican club.” In the article, Deen is portrayed not as an election fraudster but as a victim of a power-hungry executive board intent on overriding the democratic will of the Columbia Republicans. “The votes are made up and the rules don’t matter,” reads the byline. It describes “three separate attempts to rig the election in favor of Pomerantz.” The author, Clayton Smith, GS ’25, had somehow obtained copies of the ballots, and pointed out that three of them have suspiciously similar handwriting. “According to Sundial’s analysis of the ballots, Deen won by an even wider margin, winning about three-fourths of the vote.”
The article did not go over well with campus Republicans. “I don't know which is more insulting, that I would try to rig the election or that I would fail at rigging the election,” says the vote counter, referring to the article’s claim that she manipulated the election in favor of the candidate who ultimately lost. Another member of the executive board says that Du “had one of his reporters on the story, but he gave all the information.” (Du claims that he “gave [Smith] the required background information to begin investigating, as any editor would.”) “You might as well just write in the first person,” says the vote counter. “It's like, oh, this is my self-insert fanfiction of what happened.”
That’s when things began to boil over. Deen illustrated her relationship with Pomerantz in the days following the impeachment and the Sundial article: “Yesterday I saw him on campus,” she told me. “He [took] a water bottle and chuck[ed] it at a wall.”
To understand why an article in Sundial mattered so much to the Columbia Republicans, you have to understand that many of them take their public profiles extremely seriously in case they run for office (or, as we will later see, for when they become an outspoken voice in the national media). A few months before the publication of this piece, in fact, Deen and Adam Lehodey, GS ’25—another one of the men confronting the vote counter the night of the election— informed me that they did not want the article that I was writing to affect anyone’s future “legally or financially,” and that if there were lies in the piece they could sue for libel. (The article is going out after three months of conversations with first amendment lawyers.)
But all of that came many months later—in the weeks following the election and then the Sundial article, I spent my free time following a web of claims that all contradicted each other. Pomerantz’s supporters told me that there had never been more than 10-15 members on any given night of the Columbia Republicans club; it was physically impossible for all of Deen’s voters to actually be members. Deen echoed Sundial’s claim that the executive board had fixed the election against her by discounting ballots. People on both sides claimed that the notorious John Jay Society had rigged the other.
On April 25th, when I attended the Columbia Democrats election, I also noticed something odd. Both of the candidates for president of the club had been present at the Columbia Republicans election the month before. Naturally, when they were taking questions from the audience, I asked the two candidates what they had been doing there.
“I was at the election because I was told to come through and watch what was to be a spectacle,” said Calixto Herrera, CC ’26, one of the candidates.
Bryson Chang, CC ’26: “I am a voting member of the CU Republicans.” He then won the election and is the current president of the Columbia Democrats.
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My final interview with Deen took place the day the first encampment went up. For many weeks, the entire election saga felt pointless: Why was I writing about conservative gossip amidst everything that was happening?
But there’s also a way in which the entire impeachment saga played out right beneath the surface of all that was taking place on campus. These people—who, days before, had been accusing each other of voter fraud, squabbling over club leadership, and throwing water bottles at walls—were suddenly handed a national microphone.
David Pomerantz made the rounds on numerous TV networks. “It’s the New York Times,” he called out to me as I passed him outside Hamilton Hall. “This is some major league shit.” Jonas Du ended up on Fox News and then CNN. (He was identified as the editor-in-chief of the Sundial; a non-Columbia friend of mine thought this was our official school newspaper.) One of them spoke as a moderate, the other as a Jew; neither identified as a Republican or a student club politician entangled in an intricate collegiate election fraud scandal. But they were the ones who, in many cases, spoke for the student body. If it was hard for the Columbia Republicans to verify who was who in their club elections, it was even harder for the national media—who had just parachuted onto campus—to figure out who they were talking to.
“It’s hard for anyone to feel safe,” said Pomerantz to CBS. He described the campus chaos on NY1 as well. “The university has no longer become a place where students can learn,” he said to Fox News. Jonas Du also went on Fox to declare campus a “war zone.” He was the one describing the police raid of Hamilton Hall on CNN. My mother, not realizing who he was, sent me his tweets—which were often getting upwards of 10,000 views—and suggested I come home for my safety.
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Many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators had been told not to speak to the media. Student journalists would sometimes go on TV, but they were not quite as aggressive about making their voices heard. It was Pomerantz and Du and a host of other people on the campus conservative scene whose perspectives would ultimately go out to the country, the donors, and, thereby, the Columbia administration.
It’s strange being part of a symbol. Little things in your life take on an entirely different meaning in the world beyond Columbia’s locked gates. A janitor was photographed confronting the occupants of Hamilton Hall outside my Literature Humanities classroom. Khymani James, CC ’25, who was banned from campus for saying “be grateful that I am not just going out and murdering Zionists” and then later sued Columbia University, had been a classmate in my Parties, Elites, and Democracy seminar. What would normally be nothing more than gossip is imbued with bizarre significance.
Deen won in the end, by the way—the Columbia Republicans had another election after the impeachment. Many on the executive board wanted the vote to be in person, but a complaint was submitted to SGB about how the club’s executive board was being antisemitic by insisting on in-person elections during the period of the encampment and Passover. Everybody backed down and no one ran against Deen. But at that point, nobody was paying attention. Bigger things were happening.
When the media and the politicians descend upon Columbia, they treat our campus as a symbol. It’s easier that way. You don’t have to figure out who is who. You can turn each person into a chess piece on one side or the other, and as long as you know how chess pieces move, everything can be explained and understood. You don’t have to descend to particulars. You don’t have to figure out who these people are, who speak for the student body. You certainly don’t have to descend to gossip.
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If you stood outside Hamilton on the night of its occupation, you could have seen all kinds of people. There were the protesters, yes. There were onlookers as well—maybe even as many onlookers as protesters. There were student reporters. There were confused John Jay staff members. There was my freshman year economics professor. And for a brief moment, in a lull, there was a chant led by Pomerantz & co.: “USA! USA! USA!” The chant would last for less than a minute, and it would be drowned out by the cacophony of the moment. But not really. Because the next day, they were the ones who had witnessed the occupation of Hamilton Hall.
And where were the others? Where were the engineering students who were studying and the professors who were trying to decide whether to cancel finals and the people in their dorms who were having conversations and the Jewish students who would go to Shabbat dinner at Hillel but did not want to be political combatants? I don’t know. Not on TV. They were not a part of the symbiotic relationship between the press and the partisans. They were too ambiguous. Too messy. Maybe too afraid. Without them, only the two sides were left, and in the critical hours between the takeover of Hamilton Hall and the Columbia administration’s response, they were the ones speaking to the world. For anybody who was watching, a proxy war took place on Columbia’s campus.
That night, hundreds of police officers in riot gear marched onto campus.